We're so grateful for the ongoing recognition of our anthology Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the US (Paloma Press, September 2023) .

This sends us the message that besides the science which gives us the important information we need as we face the growing challenges of climate extremity, there truly is also a great need for expressing and hearing our stories and poems.

We're thrilled therefore at this recognition of our efforts in this book, through this message from President Joe Biden at the White House.

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Also, here is the link to the interactive DEAR HUMAN microsite (from our collaboration with PoetsForScience and the Wick Poetry Center). We hope that you'll check it out, interact with the poetry prompts there, and share with your own networks.

As we move into 2024— if there are poets who are near enough each other and might consider organizing DEAR HUMAN readings in their area, please let us know so we can see how to be of assistance and how we can help to publicize.

In the meantime, thank you so much again for your words and hopes for a better world!

Today marks 13 years of writing at least a poem a day.

When I began this daily writing practice, I had no specific plans for sustaining it over such a length of time. I had no idea.

I was simply driven by my own need to carve out some time in the day— every day— where I could meet myself in my writing, by trying to tune out the sounds of other kinds of demands even if only for the space of half an hour to forty minutes at a time.

There are many things I've learned about myself and about my own writing process and habits; and there are many more things I know I am still learning.

But what my daily writing practice has given me, besides poems to return to and revise and organize into book manuscripts (4) or chapbooks (4), is the joy of knowing I am happiest writing poems. For me this simply means, writing poems is my favorite way to process the information daily life throws at me.

And I am very grateful.

Here's a prompt I shared in the final session of my recently concluded Poetry Workshop at The Muse Writers Center; I wrote it in the form of a letter --

Dear Poets,

On New Year’s Eve afternoon this year, I reluctantly let myself be cajoled into joining our friends/neighbors for an impromptu dinner at their home. I was tired; no, more than tired, dispirited. We’d had a really terrible year, with illness in the family—the back and forth to the doctors, inconclusive results, plenty of trial and error. These kinds of things of course have an impact on our ability to work, to give of our own internal resources; to find rest, ease, laughter… Of course this is hardly original, nor is it new. 

But when I sat down at my desk to compose this and a prompt for our final week/meeting ahead— I was reminded of that day, looking up/away from this computer, where, by the window, there’s a thriving Monstera plant next to a small potted Pilea.

That New Year’s Eve afternoon, after we’d eaten, our friends Sookyung and Harry impulsively said, Let’s go around the corner so you can meet our new friends! They’d met them, she said, because of some random-seeming thing: finding a wallet a few days previous on one of their walks, with their one year old in a stroller… The address was only a few houses away, and they were delighted to be able to do a good deed. When we got there, we were immediately enfolded— by grandparents (who immediately asked to play with S & H’s toddler), nieces, some work friends. People were gathered around board games at the dining table, and a miniature disco ball winked over plates of snacks in the kitchen.  

We didn’t stay long, because babies had to be put to bed, and it had started to rain. Before we said our goodbyes, though, I complimented our host enthusiastically on the lush and beautiful greenery inside her home, especially all the large and glossy varieties of Monstera in practically every corner. I wish I had a green thumb like yours, I said. She reassured me they were not hard to propagate, then disappeared down the hallway, only to come back with a large glass vase with two Monstera stalks in it, little root filaments waving in the water. She thrust it into my arms—Happy new year! 

Such a small but generous gesture, but I was overwhelmed. It didn’t magically erase the difficulties and all the feels we were feeling then, but it gave me a tiny green burst of hope.

Today, a new leaf has just unfurled from the stalk. Spreading their beautiful hearts open in the window, they remind me to look up and pause.

~ Luisa

Writing Prompt
Look up from wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.
Write about what catches your eye (large or small) — and what you remember. 
Is there a story that rises to the foreground? Write about the you in that memory 
               either from within the memory, or from the point you inhabit now, in
               the present.

Hello again...

I know I've not been here for a while (it feels like ages) — but so much has happened, and I've been unable to deal with more than just the basic things. 

For one, my mother passed away in the Philippines at the end of September. She'd been ailing for a while, and in the hospital four months before that, for pesky pneumonia that would not go away, plus a slew of other symptoms and the increasing fragility of someone at an advanced age, like her.

When I visited in 2015 (accompanied by my youngest daughter), she was still spunky, spirited, and strong. She walked around town, around Burnham Lake, went to the shops or to church—often wearing a hat to go with her smart outfit, greeting everyone she knew and then taking leave of them with her signature I love you!  She brought dragon fruit to us at our hotel, ate many meals with us at Hill Station. Before we left, she came bearing gifts of silver jewelry from the market, and 2 pairs of shoes which she insisted I take— one was a pair of bright pink flats with anemone-like pom-poms, and the other was a pair of gold high-top sneakers with ruffles (!). You can wear them when you go to the grocery store, or even gardening, she exhorted; after all, YOLO. This made me blink in amusement and surprise— I'd never heard her use such expressions. I accepted the flats, but declined the latter pair, saying I was not brave enough to pull those off.

I visited again in January 2020, just before (it seemed) the whole world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I'd been prevailed upon by an older cousin on my father's side, to come home and take care of some of the legal paperwork necessary so that she could continue to help me do everything necessary to assure the care of my mother, even if I no longer lived there. During this visit, my mother's deteriorated physical condition was more than concerning. She was sharing her home with family members, but it appeared that she had been suffering from their cruel and deliberate neglect. That is a longer and more complicated story, but suffice it to say that my cousin and I made arrangements to transfer her immediately to a care home, to a safe environment where she has stayed for the last 3 years before her death— where she was looked after by kind and devoted caregivers. In fact, three of these young women who looked after her, along with my cousin, stayed at her side until the end; and I and my family are forever grateful. 

We all knew that my mother was approaching the inevitable, and so it feels like we've been incrementally grieving her passing even before she actually transitioned out of her life. While I've tried to be as present as I could be under the circumstances, now that she is gone it has been very difficult to know how to carry this grief. It's only been 2 months since her death. Sometimes I do not know at all what to do with this loss, but I also still feel deeply and in the same way about my father, though he died more than 33 years ago...

I try to keep busy, to do what I have to do in my daily life, though everything, including everything in the world these days, feels raw and sharp.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Mateo, July 6, 2023 — In the U.S., the congressionally mandated Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) report is currently in development, and groups of scientists from all over the country and Caribbean are overseeing the synthesis of published research for regional and topic-specific chapters. Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States is offered as a companion to NCA5, and an additional opportunity to participate in the urgent conversations on environmental justice.

Edited by Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellows Luisa A. Igloria & Aileen Cassinetto and NCA5 Chapter Lead Dr. Jeremy S. Hoffman, the anthology’s 70+ contributors include Union of Concerned Scientists director Erika Spanger and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, with a Foreword by Claire Wahmanholm & Afterword by Dr. Sam Illingworth.

“This book reminds us we are in a state of collapse as well as rebirth. It is both lamp and spear, lyric and shield. It is a companion we will need as we navigate the long dark night of the climate crisis and the rubble of human certainties and conceits.” —Renato Redentor Constantino, Deputy Chair of the Expert Advisory Group of the 58-government Climate Vulnerable Forum 

So much gratitude to our contributors Ernesto L. Abeytia, Bradley Allf, Anna Bartel, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Mary Grace Bertulfo, Amanda M. Blake, Dave Bonta, Cassandra Bousquet, Allen Braden, Cynthia T. Buiza, Kate Cell, Eva Chen, Everett Cruz, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Sofia Fall, Molly Fisk, Mary Fitzpatrick, Eric Forsbergh, Sue Davis Gabbay, Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell, Gail Giewont, Caitlin Gildrien, Annette Holland, John Hoppenthaler, Catherine Hulshof De La Peña, E.W.I. Johnson, Melinda Koyanis, Marisa Lin, Karen Llagas, Katharyn Howd Machan, David S. Maduli, Kindra McDonald, Joshua McPeak, Mac Mestayer, Claire Millikin, Rajiv Mohabir, Heidi Mordhost, Susanne Moser, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, January Gill O'Neil, Calvin Olsen, Craig Santos Perez, Jeanine Pfeiffer, Ngoc Pham, Alice Plane, Kyle Potvin, Aman Rahman, Chelsea Rathburn, Sheri Reda, Kim Roberts, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Ellen Sander, Alan Semerdjian, Emily Schulten, Jordan Steven Sher, Kim Shuck, Martha Silano, Brian Sonia-Wallace, Erika Spanger, Mark Spitzer, Eileen Tabios, Ellen Taylor, Sony Ton-Aime, Angela Narciso Torres, Brian Turner, Cindy Veach Lappetito, Claire Wahmanholm, Leana Weissberg, Lesley Wheeler, Wendi White, Denise Wilcox, Maw Shein Win, Diana Woodcock, Khaty Xiong, & U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

For review copies, please email editor "at" palomapress.org

Thank you so much to Fish Publishing and to contest Judge Billy Collins, for awarding THIRD PLACE to my poem "Extinction" (out of 2,348 entries).

Here is what the contest judge said about my poem:

EXTINCTION by Luisa A. Igloria      

"A poem with a facility of movement, swinging from the Judas goat to Darwin, a dying dog, and ending with our own dead, how they linger and return.  What a pleasure to watch [t]his poet’s mind at work, guiding us this way and that, then landing on our own experience with mortality.  A poem with many interests, including the reader." – Billy Collins

Congratulations to my fellow winners in the 2023 Fish Poetry Prize!

...to the Library of Virginia, Tara Bray, Lynda Perry; and J. Bruce Fuller, Amy Wright, and Jesse Graves, Volume Editors of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. IX: Virginia (Texas Review Press) for hosting the fabulous virtual reading and launch last night.

​Thank you for your support— for buying a copy or several, teaching it in your classrooms, recommending it to friends and book groups and libraries!
 

Looking forward to joining Delegate for the 42nd House District in the Commonwealth of Virginia KATHY TRAN; Treasurer of the Democratic Asian Americans of Virginia and 8th District Dems ROSE CHU; Director, NAKASEC Action Fund (and mah friend and neighbor!) SOOKYUNG OH; and Director of the Asian American Pacific Islander Civic Engagement (ACE) Collaborative of New Virginia Majority MITCHELL YANGON in this 12 NN-1:00 PM "FRIDAY POWER LUNCH" AAPI Roundtable on 21 APRIL--
Registration Link is here. Hope you can join us!

Over at the Virginia Poets Database, we have a SPOTLIGHT ON ECOPOETRY from ODU FACULTY AND STUDENTS.

​Thanks so much to the writers who contributed their work, and to Karen Vaughan and Tope Larayetan for all their assistance in building this resource.
  
And if you are, or know, a VA Poet, please consider adding (your) information to the database!   

It's April, which means it's Happy National Poetry Month (NaPoMo) 2023. I hope you'll enjoy coming back here each day this April, for a poetry prompt or two. Happy writing!

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30 April

In a poem, explore what it means to outlast or outlive (something or someone). 

29 April

There are any of a number of human-made or synthetic things that bear some kind of resemblance to a natural thing or object. 

For instance, a bomb looks like a pomegranate, a grenade like a pine cone or a pineapple; a traffic light like a tray of red, yellow, and green bell peppers; a handheld fan like a ginkgo leaf; a pincushion like a sea urchin.

Write a poem in which you incorporate this kind of cross-image-making, which then also serves to add to the poem's subject and "meaning."

28 April

Write a poem in which you explore the texture of things, or the texture of some experience.

If you can, look for or create a new word or two to capture its distinctness.  

​For instance, throughout her new book, poet Claire Wahmanholm uses the word "meltwater" - which means water formed by the melting of snow and ice, especially from a glacier.

27 April

To curate means to organize and present a collection, perhaps according to a theme or the category to which the objects or specimens belong. 

Write a poem which could be seen to curate a selection of images or material objects that are connected to each other.
 
For example, if you were to write an "Animal Crossing" poem, what would be on your island?  

26 April

There are some styles of woodworking where no metal is used. There is a Japanese technique called Sashimono, for instance, which (instead of nails or hinges) uses carved mortises and grooves to join parts of furniture so that the surface appears seamless.

Sometimes, we use "seamlessness" to describe a quality achieved by art/writing — by which I think we mean that the labor or craft behind the doing of the thing, is not visible. Maybe the lines or images seem to enter the poem as if without effort. Maybe this is what's meant when writers talk about sound and sense being one. 

But there are also other folk art traditions in which the mistake, the visible seam, is deliberately incuded in the work, sometimes as a way in which the artist(an) might acknowledge that they participate in the greater creative energy of the universe...

Write a poem in a form of your choosing, but include a deliberate departure or swerve away from the form. Make that difference not a mistake, but another place in which you can introduce another layer of meaning or experience in the poem.

25 April

What words would you say form your (current) poetic vocabulary? 
Pick one, and write a poem exploring its meanings; let it also move you toward whatever else it suggests. If it works, use this word as the title.

24 April

One of the Annie Dillard quotes I come back to often is this one:

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”​

What are a few things you've been keeping/saving for some imagined better time or place in the future? Take them out of the safe and write (about) them.

23 April

Write a poem in which you walk an answer (or something you already know) back to a time when you didn't know...  What was that like?

22 April 

What comes to mind when you think of  "balm?"
Write an ode to what soothes - a burn, a callus, your thirst or sleeplessness. 

21 April

Does it sometimes feel that you are trying to sing in the darkness, or trying to write poems to celebrate what yet remains to be seen, or is yet to come? During such times, I try to remember that elegy is only the other face of the ode. 

Write a poem in which someone specific (who is your poem’s persona?) makes amends, rights a wrong, reveals the truth instead of a lie, brings back or returns something that was taken.

Write a poem celebrating these gestures and pointing out an opening.

In your poem, include the following: the name of a specific street or place; an animal and the sound it makes; a tactile experience (reference to texture/touch); a compound word (ex. battleship, crowbar).   

20 April

Are there things you used to love when you were younger that for some reason you don’t, now? What does that change mean to you? Are you able to come back to that thing you avoided or cast off for a long time, and see how you can love it again? Here are 3 poems to read as you think about and write to this prompt--
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Naomi Shihab Nye, “Boy and Egg”   
Leila Chatti, “Ode to Ugly Things” 
Tyree Daye, “Tamed”  

19 April

Jake Skeets once said in an interview: 

“…We talk about the violence that still occurs. Of course, this may not seem joyful but I define joy differently than its greeting-card definition. Joy back home is always mixed with an observation of the challenges. Joy back home is not just ecstatic-outward joy. Joy, for us, is deep reflective joy. Joy is also the work we put into our relationships and responsibilities. Our joy is a joy called joy and a joy called survival.”

Write a poem about the many forms of your joy, not just the "ecstatic-outward joy." 

18 April

It's spring, and the pollen count is high. 
Pick 7 random words from out of a book or dictionary, and use these to seed a poem. 

17 April

Write an Emoji poem. 
Using your phone text messaging, write down lines of random emojis (or get someone to text them to you). Aim for at least 12 - 14 lines. Now, "translate" the emoji lines into a poem.

16 April

What toggles a particular memory loose from the larger collection of one's memories? Go through the five senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste (according to scientists, there is at least one more sense: proprioception, meaning, one's perception of the body's movement in or through space)— Look at a specific thing, smell a specific thing, listen to a specific sound, etc. Write down what associations come to mind. Write a poem about the strongest  memory this exercise allows you to find your way to.

15 April

Sometimes, making a list can be a way to find grounding. For instance, in Dorianne Laux's poem "What's Broken," the litany she names ranges from sky to stem, roots to grass, beads from a necklace of long-ago days. Pick a similar category—What's half? What's whole? What's mine, or yours?—and write a poem that uses the list as the primary organizing principle. Let the images and concrete description do the work—try not to explain them. 


14 April

What kinds of flora and fauna are native to the place where you live now? to the place you came from, if you are from somewhere else? Is there any one of these that fascinates you — for its name, the stories around it, its properties, its uses? Write an ode to it.


13 April

Have you ever written a letter that for some reason you never sent to its intended recipient? Write a letter poem addressed to someone or something that won't ever see or read it; what would you say in it?


12 April

Enter your name into a Google search field. See who else has your name, see if you can glean something about what they do. Pick one "doppelgänger" and write about this alternate "you"'s life.

11 April 

Pick up/take note of/or take a picture of three random things you see on your way to or from home—a crumpled coffee cup? a belt buckle? a gas station receipt? 
Put them together in a poem. What story do they tell?

10 April

How long can a breath be held? How long, exactly, can a fermata hold, especially since it is defined as a rest or duration of unspecified length? And how do we hold what cannot be held? 

Write about a kind of holding.
 
9 April

Not enough time. Time out. Time-bound. Running out of time. In the nick of time. Timed.
What would it be like to have enough time? 
Write a poem in which you imagine what that might be like.

8 April

Yes, I'm nerdy, and I play Wordle too...

How about we turn it into a poem form?
Write a 6-line poem (individual lines can be short or long; no need for rhyme or meter).

Use a five-letter word in the first line, and manipulate that word so you change one letter each time in the succeeding lines, until you come to the last/6th line.

In your last line, you should have a five-letter word whose "evolution" you can track from the first line.

7 April

Write a poem in the voice of a whale. 

6 April

One of my favorite surreal artists is Leonora Carrington, who was born on this day in 1917.
I adore her "Self Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse)." 
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I remember coming across this feature on her in which the writer, Merve Emre, describes how she "had been made," instead of born:

"One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook.​"

Write a poem that remakes your own "origin story."

5 April 
​
There are sayings which I find maddening because they seem to have the power to fix you in one spot, after which you (or I) feel absolutely superglued to the condition. For example, "One is only as happy as their saddest child." Or, "You made your bed, you lie in it." But, I mean, who has such omniscience over another??

Write a poem that argues against one such saying, and goes in a different direction toward a different possibility or outcome.

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4 April

This week, in my Craft of Poetry class, we are discussing and writing Ekphrastic poems. I like to think of  ekphrasis not as a caption to visual art— but as a way to let our psyches simply be engaged by the nonverbal. Aided by memory and imagery, visual art can make us feel invited to come into or revisit experiences that might sometimes be too difficult to approach.   

Write an ekphrastic poem in response to a work of art that recently caught your attention or that you could not so easily forget.


3 April

What is your talismanic animal, your myth-muse, your amulet or anting-anting?

Write a poem about this: what are its characteristics, its powers, its weaknesses and flaws? how did it come to you? how did you discover it, or birth it, or adoit? What is its name? Where does it sleep? How do you carry it with you in the world?


2 April

Dear Rainer Maria Rilke,

in Letter 4 of your Letters to a Young Poet, you say: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them...."

You got that part right, about the locked rooms and the unreadable texts, about all that keeps you out and won't let you in, about what you can't seem to see for the doubt or sorrow or the wound,

And oh, Rilke, this is so f****** hard. You know I am not a patient one. 

You say, perhaps someday we will "live...into the answer." (Key word: perhaps.)

Write a poem about one of those questions "unsolved in your heart" right now, in this space and time. What do you do when you seethe in dreams, behind your screens, wanting those answers, wanting to figure things out? 


1 April
Fool: according to dictionaries of etymology--from the early 13c., "silly, stupid, or ignorant person," from Old French fol "madman, insane person; idiot; rogue; jester," also "blacksmith's bellows," also an adjective meaning "mad, insane" (12c., Modern French fou), from Medieval Latin follus (adj.) "foolish," from Latin follis "bellows, leather bag," from PIE root *bhel- (2) "to blow, swell."

But in the Tarot, the Fool might represent a state of inexperience and incompleteness that can be childlike and trusting; that can stand for a new beginning. As Cervantes said in Don Quixote, "“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” 

Write a poem about this kind of foolishness: leaning into spontaneity, or believing in luck or something good despite the haters or naysayers.

Here we are again, friends — one of my favorite times of the year kicks off on the 1st of April:
National Poetry Month.

I love what our current US Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, says about what poetry does, what it can do, that other more "transactional" kinds of language don't appear able to do--

​“I didn’t sign up for anything limited when I chose poetry... I signed up for something that is about trying, on some level, to harness the unsayable.”  

Come back to find a new poetry prompt here, every day this April.
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